When a fireball tore through the night sky over Barnet a year ago, Bobby Farlice-Rubio was in the kitchen washing dishes.

“It lit up the landscape,” he recalled Friday. “The sky glowed blue for about a second, really bright, like bright enough to be daylight.”

The meteor that shot across New England just after 10 p.m. Feb. 28, 2012, reportedly was seen from New Hampshire to Ontario. Farlice-Rubio, a science teacher at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium in St. Johnsbury, suspects it burned up in the atmosphere somewhere over the ocean.

As far as he knows, no one ever had recorded a meteor exploding within Earth’s atmosphere before Friday morning, when dashboard and surveillance cameras captured such an occurrence over Russia’s Chelyabinsk region.

“People have seen the fireballs, but the thing is, when you see that fireball, it could be so many miles away,” Farlice-Rubio said.

Steve Yerby, vice president of the Vermont Astronomical Society, said he expects the proliferation of video-recording technology to lead to more documentation of such phenomena.

“I think it happens on a regular basis,” Yerby said. “As we get more media-savvy, and everyone gets video cameras on their iPhones, these things will show up more often.”

At the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium on Friday morning, Farlice-Rubio shared news of the meteor with a class of third graders visiting from Danville School.

“It’s a very exciting day here at the museum,” he said. “I could not help but incorporate this new footage on YouTube and all that in the class.”

The explosion over Russia on Friday morning released several kilotons of energy and a shock wave that rolled over more than 1 million square feet, shattering windows and injuring more than 1,000 people.

Farlice-Rubio said as far as he knows, no one has ever been killed by a meteor — “although one did strike a mailbox and burned the mail inside,” he added, referring to a Claxton, Ga. incident on Dec. 10, 1984.

NASA also has no record of a person being killed by a meteor, although it states that a shower of meteorites that fell on Nakhla, Egypt, on June 28, 1911, killed a dog.

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The first person reportedly injured by a meteorite, according to the agency, was Ann Hodges, who was napping in her house in Sylacauga, Ala., on Nov. 30, 1954, when she was struck and “severely bruised” by an eight-pound meteorite that had crashed through the roof.

Perhaps coincidentally, the meteor that exploded Friday over Russia arrived hours ahead of a slightly more menacing space rock, Asteroid 2012 da14, which streaked across Australia later in the afternoon, coming closer to Earth than some communication satellites.

And that one, at roughly 150 feet in diameter, was still small potatoes, Yerby said.

“This one today would not end life on Earth,” Yerby said Friday. The asteroid believed to have killed off the dinosaurs, by comparison, measured several miles in diameter.

So how soon before the next big one?

“I have to say as an astronomer, and someone who thinks about the subject often, it’s just a matter of time,” Farlice-Rubio said. Fortunately, he added, “for the first time in history, we have the wherewithal to do something about it.”

An asteroid large enough to cause mass destruction on Earth would be spotted by astronomers months, if not years or decades, before impact, he said. And all we would have to do avoid extinction would be to launch a rocket at the asteroid and slow it down a few miles per hour or nudge it a few meters off course.

“A rocket in space, in the vacuum of space, a very tiny rocket is all it takes,” Farlice-Rubio said. “It’s not like that movie ‘Armageddon.’ What they did in ‘Armageddon’ (nuking the asteroid) is actually the stupidest thing you can do.”